Photography: Carmen Conde. RAE
Carmen Count Abellan was born in Cartagena (Murcia) on 15 August of 1907. He worked as rural teacher and also founded the Popular University of his city. She was a friend of Azorín, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Hernández, María Cegarra, or Vicente Aleixandre and Antonio Buero Vallejo. She studied literature with Dámaso Alonso and published prose and verse. Was the first woman to enter as a full academician at the Royal Spanish Academy in 1979 and occupied chair K. Among his works some titles are Lives against your mirror (novel) or I blow that goes and does not return (stories). These are some selected poems as a memorial to his memory.
Carmen Conde Abellán — Selected Poems
La entrega
Because the body
the whole body sheltering life
its dark yet illustrious omnipotence,
It is always here, it will always be.
And who loves and who wants, wants
possess and surrender possessing.
Evening and night, dawn or morning,
love, love claims the body
in dim walk, or rowdy
by lava filled path:
the gloomy eternity that gives life
embedded death.
An icy volcano; are they oceans
lucid and giddy
with fury to die while I love?
Because this is the delivery of the one who loves:
a despotic catastrophe.
Am I like this, am I this, he wonders,
growing from wild crossroads,
living from my death that I rescue,
with fury to die when I love?
The body meekly listens inside
and another me is suffocated in the question.
How intact the awakening. already stripping
the invasion of itself, the body groans.
The sea returns claiming it absorbent
and again collapses and recovers.
rain in may
How beautiful you, the sleepless one!
It takes you and molds you sweet wind
above gardens and statues.
Your body is that of Venus on the shore
eternally sea inside the dawn.
Always come to me, be propitious to me.
The feast of the leaves on its branches
slender dreamers give you up
that in moving clusters rise.
I don't have a flower... Only my trunk
houses a bell for fruit.
Rain that I contemplate, melancholic:
don't grow up for me I live flooded.
all eyes
Glances are trees that lose their leaves.
You have to penetrate the compact,
to drill the mystery to discover the ground
covered with poplars, elms,
of web-footed cedars.
The tight vegetation humiliates under the weight of time
its radiant copiousness, of humid ethers...
Ah the rushing rush
of the branches, of the looks
cutting themselves from their trunks!
Just something, just the acid vapor that dilates
the teeth of the relentless herd
when he bites the grass...
Invisible smoke of torn greenery,
warm plume of odours.
We lose them, cutting them unconscious
of long contemplation.
And we stayed in desert lands,
on ravaged shores,
in fake oases without water or palm trees.
Why, until when, at what time
All those glances will meet in a frenetic beam,
to become a brief definitive ray?
This slimy slippery floor,
the tides of leaves that were eyes
clinging to things, to beings, to the illusion of seeing!
First love
What surprise your body, what ineffable vehemence!
To be all this yours, to be able to enjoy everything
without having dreamed it, without ever
a slight hope would promise happiness.
This bliss of fire that empties your head,
that pushes you back,
knocks you into an abyss
that has no measure or depth.
abyss and only abyss
from you to death!
Your arms!
Your arms are the same as other days,
and tremble and close around his body.
Your chest, the one that sighs, foreign, shaken
of things that you ignore,
of worlds that move it…
Oh chest of your body, so firm and so sensitive
that a mist makes it cloudy
and a kiss pierces it!
If no one ever said that they loved each other so much!
Could you expect your hair to burn,
that all you are will fall like fire
in a shout without number,
from a mountain range shouted by the dawn?
Ash you someday? ash this madness
what do you do with the newly sprouted life in the world?
You never end, you never turn off!
Here you have the fire, the one that catches everything
to burn the sky raising the earth.